English Discourse Particles

Evidence from a corpus

There are few aspects of language which are more problematic than its discourse particles. The present study of discourse particles draws upon data from the London-Lund Corpus to show how the methods and tools of corpora can sharpen their description. The first part of the book provides a picture of the state of the art in discourse particle studies and introduces the theory and methodology for the analysis in the second part of the book. Discourse particles are analysed as elements which have been grammaticalised and as a result have certain properties and uses. The importance of linguistic and contextual cues such as text type, position in the discourse, prosody and collocation for analysing discourse particles is illustrated. The following chapters deal with specific discourse particles (now, oh, just, sort of, and that sort of thing, actually) on the basis of their empirical analysis in the London-Lund Corpus. Examples and extended extracts from many different text types are provided to illustrate what discourse particles are doing in discourse.

“Overall I found "English Discourse Particles" to be very manageable, accessible and pleasant to read. Aijmer's book "English Discourse Particles" gives a very thorough and fine-grained description of the functions of some frequent English DPs. This book is a very rich source of information about the studies that have been undertaken in English (as well as in other languages, such as Italian, French, German and Swedish). This book will therefore be useful to a large group of people, primarily those interested in discourse analysis in general and in DPs in particular. Because this book is very important for the insights it provides about the principles and the mechanisms or routines that are in place when we talk, this volume will certainly also be of much interest to those dealing with more practical applications of linguistic studies: language teachers and lexicographers.”

Anna-Maria De Cesare on Linguist List 14.87, 2003

“This monograph represents a very valuable addition to our knowledge of the formal and pragmatic properties of a number of specific English DPs, and several of the questions it raises will almost certainly be a source of inspiration of future scholarship.”

2015. The computer-mediated expression of surprise: A corpus analysis of chats by English and Italian native speakers and Italian learners of English.
Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 ► pp. 383 ff.

2011. The Business of Pragmatics. The Case of Discourse Markers in The Speech of Students of Business English and English Linguistics.
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 161 ► pp. 10 ff.

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